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Sex Education In France: An Imbalanced History, Marisa Peters

Honors Theses

Although the history of sex education is relatively new, it is very complex. Enlightenment philosophers from Rousseau to de Sade had ideas on what the sex education of girls and of boys should entail, with Rousseau preparing her for marriage, and the latter preparing her to be a libertine! In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries there were stereotypes too, of girls in the countryside learning about sex as a result of cramped living and proximity to farm animals. For young bourgeois women in the city, there were manuals on marriage and how to perform their wifely …